ICE: Inventory Cleaning Evaluation

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Introducing ICE: Inventory Cleaning Evaluation, TMS Insight's inspection scheduling and management software.

ICE is an easy to use management tool for scheduling and conducting site inspections.

Using its intuitively compiled database of your rooms and their items, ICE automatically schedules inspections via an on-screen calendar (which can be pushed to Microsoft Outlook via iCal) and wirelessly synchronises this inspection data to a portable device such as a PDA or smartphone.

Using this device the inspection is conducted and the results streamed to the ICE system for reporting and analysis.

Key features include:

	Automatically schedules inspections to an onscreen calendar and your Microsoft Outlook calendar		Inspections conducted with dedicated PDA or Smartphone app

	Analyses recorded data and presents it in beautiful yet practical reports		On screen alerts when a fault is recorded during an inspection

	Automatically calculates the financial cost of cleaning each room		Developed in partnership with the National Health Service

System Overview

ICE was developed as the result of a close collaboration between Surrey & Sussex NHS Trust and TMS Insight (Data Capture) Ltd.

ICE is inspection management software. With its in-depth database of your facility ICE schedules inspections to your calendar and allows you to conduct them with a dedicated portable device.

Whilst originally designed for the hospital environment ICE can be used within any organisation where good quality and effective cleaning needs to be achieved.

System Objectives

Offer schedules of cleaning quality inspections and keep records of when inspections are due & overdue.
Use portable devices such as PDAs and iPhones to wirelessly conduct inspections.
Use a painless, innovative methodology of building a database of rooms and items.
Automatically calculate how long a room, including all items within that room, should take to clean.
Include comprehensive reporting and data filtering capabilities.

Can ICE be used to ensure inspections are conducted properly?

There's piece of mind in knowing that your inspections are being conducted perfectly. To this end, ICE can guarantee the room was visited by the inspector by prompting them to scan a special barcode mounted at each room. If the current user is required by the system to scan these barcodes, the inspection of the room cannot go ahead until the barcode is provided.

Standard Minute Values - how long does cleaning take?

Not only is ICE a productive inspection management tool, it also uses the compiled database of your site to automatically calculate the time it should take to clean each room using an industry standard called SMVs (Standard Minute Values).

ICE calculates the time and financial cost of cleaning

With its intuitively compiled database of your rooms and items, ICE applies a calculated figure to each item which represents the time it takes to clean the item. When this information is scaled to all of the items and rooms across the inspection site you are left with invaluable information about your cleaning practices.

And that's not all. With this information ICE can work out to the penny the financial cost of cleaning each individual room by applying your cleaner's hourly rate to the total calculated SMV.

"How much money will I save by reducing the frequency of linen changes?"
"I need to have a room cleaned seven days per week, how much extra will this cost?"

"How can I improve the cleaning efficiency of my organisation?"

With ICE, the answer is only a click away.

How it works

ICE works by combining an in depth database of your site with an intuitive inspection scheduler. This allows your users to conduct inspections with a dedicated portable device, such as a Windows Mobile device or iPhone.

ICE provides:

Dedicated, easy to use portable devices.
A web interface allowing instant access from anywhere your network allows (portable devices can also function offline).
Totally customisable to suit your organisation and facility.
Legendary ease-of-use for both inspectors and system administrators.
A powerful reporting engine meaning your data can be presented in any way you see fit.
Reports can be easily printed or emailed to relevant managers.

How do I compile the database of my facility? Does it take a long time?

ICE relies on a database of your site to facilitate its inspection technology, consisting of rooms and the items in those rooms that require cleaning. However, nobody wants to spend forever individually adding items to a database, so we designed ICE so you don't need to. By adding the items to a room once, ICE automatically suggests those items for all future rooms of that type.

This intuitive approach to the setup process means your site can be completely added to the ICE database in minutes.

The inspections at my organisation are done on a schedule. Will ICE keep this schedule for me?

Most organisations would prefer their inspections to be done on a schedule. With ICE, you can save an inspection template and have it repeat as frequently or as infrequently as you would like (or not at all for one-off inspections).

With a few inspections set up like this a schedule of inspections builds up in the ICE calendar, viewable right from the ICE homepage, your portable devices and even your Outlook calendar (or other iCal compatible software).

Once the schedule of inspections is ready, how will we actually go ahead and conduct them?

With a schedule of inspections created on your ICE system your PDA/iPhone will be immediately ready to go. The ICE portable app just needs to be loaded up and the schedule will be immediately available on the device, meaning you and your inspector's day to day routine won't even involve loading up the ICE desktop application.

Just tap the name of the inspection to begin. On the next screen the list of rooms in the inspection will be displayed, presented in the predefined walk order.

Tap the name of the room as you arrive and the item list will appear.

After inspecting the room and recording pass, fail or not available for each item, repeat the process for the other rooms.

As each room is completed the word 'inspected' will appear next to it. Once you have completed the inspection, tap 'upload' and the data is streamed over the network to the ICE system.